Evil Friends Portugal. The Man

• 1 Plastic Soldiers 05:04
• 2 Creep In A T-Shirt 03:54
• 3 Evil Friends 03:36
• 4 Modern Jesus 03:14
• 5 Hip Hop Kids 03:28
• 6 Atomic Man 03:48
• 7 Sea of Air 04:22
• 8 Waves 04:52
• 9 Holy Roller [Hallelujah] 03:21
• 10 Someday Believers 03:54
• 11 Purple Yellow Red and Blue 04:11
• 12 Smile 04:51
• Total Runtime 48:35

Info for Evil Friends

Changing sounds like they’re going out of style, Portugal. The Man teamed up with producer Danger Mouse to create the rock inspired and pop infused album, Evil Friends. Considering the fact that Danger Mouse makes up half of the R&B duo Gnarls Barkley, as well as half of the indie rock duo Broken Bells, it’s no surprise that Evil Friends can easily land in the pop-rock genre. What does surprise is just how well Danger Mouse brings out the pop sound from a band whose previous albums contain a lot more psychedelia and experimentation.

It was last spring 2012, and John Gourley—frontman of Portugal. The Man—found himself in New York City about to ring the bell at Danger Mouse’s apartment--a long way from his current home in Portland, and farther still from his real home in Alaska. Six full-length albums in six years, nonstop touring, a stint with The Black Keys and festival stops at Coachella, Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza—up until this moment, Portugal. The Man embodied all dimensions of DIY rock range.

When it came time to begin work on the seventh album, Gourley thought long and hard about the next move and kept coming back to one concept: The most satisfying work is collaborative work. From building houses with his father in Alaska to building a devoted fanbase, he had sought partnerships. So he took a bold step — bold for a proven band, bolder still for its uncertainty of sound — a step up to the apartment of a possible collaborator, Danger Mouse.

“I walked into his place,” Gourley remembers now. “And it wasn’t going to happen. He was like, ‘Hey, man, just so you know, I don’t really want to record a rock band.’ And I was a little relieved. We’d done this by ourselves before, and we knew we could do it by ourselves again.”

But then they got to listening, and to talking about how much Danger Mouse had loved In the Mountain in the Cloud — the 2011 followup to Portugal. The Man’s break out record The Satanic Satanist. “From that very first meeting,” says Danger Mouse, “we were very ambitious about what we could do…otherwise there was no point. So we decided: Let’s try and make something really special.”

So Danger Mouse — aka Brian Burton, the five-time Grammy award winning producer behind everything from Gnarls Barkley and Beck to The Black Keys and now U2 —and the band agreed that they were game for the challenge and began production on what would become Evil Friends, the undaunted re-awakening for Portugal. The Man. As much as their collaborative imaginations melded, to construct songs that lived up to the ambitious visions they had would take some time. After all, here was a band with an evolving lineup — Kyle O’Quin on keyboards, Noah Gersh on guitar/percussion/keyboards, and Kane Ritchotte on drums joined Zach Carothers on bass and vocals and Gourley on lead vocals and guitar — building new songs with a new producer trying to do something neither of them had done before.

They went, together, to Los Angeles and worked through several sessions — at Mondo Studios, Eltro Vox Studios, and Kingsize Soundlabs. The band worked months longer than they ever had on one thing. And somehow — maybe it was the collaboration in the air, or maybe sheer will — they finally stopped searching and started realizing: “What really brought our record together was getting past that period of looking for something, and figuring out how to do something really new, really hard, and really satisfying,” said Gourley.

Each track on Evil Friends is as different from the next as Portugal. The Man’s previous records were from each other, which is to say a piece of a growing mindscape, and wholly a part of the group’s tumbling fever dream. Where the 2009 hit “People Say” was a cheery guitar rally, the new title track is a bells-and-balls ballad emerging from darkness into a pipe-whistling punky thump, albeit with Gourley’s trademark falsetto and thundering guitar. And yet here is Evil Friends swirling, like a tornado that sends a napping child toward Oz, into something of a tale of Portugal. The Man’s arousal from when it decided to make something special to when it actually did: The weighted down questions of “Plastic Soldiers” (Could it be we got lost in the summer? / Well I know you know that it’s over) give way to the confident melodies of “Modern Jesus” (The only rule we need is never giving up / The only faith we have is faith in us) and finally, brazenly, to the anthem “Smile” (We watched the sun come up / But took it down to hide it / Seems like the spring has come and gone / It felt like forever).

It took all year, and Portugal. The Man — a group guaranteed for seven years to pump out a record, to tour and tour and tour, to tuck its fans to bed at night with a community of psychedelic rock — had learned to slow down and transform all-day, all-night recording with Danger Mouse into adrenaline, into words that are at once dark and light, into sounds that are overlapping with danger and charm. The whole “evil friends” thing was just a happy writing accident, by the way, a lyrical coincidence belying a collaborative friendship Burton says taught him, too: “I felt like I was watching them do something special and I wanted to let them do it, so sometimes I was more hands-on, but sometimes more hands-off than I had been with anyone,” says Danger Mouse. “They had done enough albums that I thought it would be fun to shake it up a little bit.”

“In the beginning, I asked Brian why he had wanted to talk about making a record,” recalls Gourley. “And he admitted that he was surprised when he saw us live. ‘I didn’t know you guys could sound like that.’ There had been this perception that we’ve been something else — and I’ve noticed it, at festivals, everywhere — that we were something we were not. But then we got in a room with Danger Mouse, to the place where we could just throw that out, wake up and say, Here we are. We’re this band! Let’s just make it, together.”

John Baldwin Gourley, guitar, vocals
Zachary Scott Carothers, bass, vocals
Kyle O'Quin, keyboards, synthesizers
Noah Gersh, guitar, vocals, percussion
Kane Ritchotte, drums, percussion, backing vocals

Produced by Danger Mouse

Portugal. The Man
By now, the peripatetic trail etched out by Portugal. The Man is well documented. The band’s nomadic path snakes down the Cascades, starting first in Wasilla, Alaska (yes, the very same city whose identity has been hijacked by a certain celebrity politician, one who we shall not mention again here), and then eventually settling in amongst the puddles and monochromatic haze of Portland, Oregon. There were Iditarod-racing parents, wooden cabins tucked deep in the woods, and the sort of upbringing that skews the very notion of convention. But let us end that chapter of Portugal. The Man’s lore and move forward.

That is the Portugal. The Man of then, In The Mountain In The Cloud is the Portugal. The Man of now.

In The Mountain In The Cloud marks Portugal. The Man’s sixth full-length in as many years also marks the band’s debut for Atlantic Records. Carrying forth the momentum triggered by their unexpected rise in 2006, and their FM airwave success of “People Say” (from 2009’s The Satanic Satanist), In The Mountain In The Cloud continues the pattern of an album per calendar year, a feat made all the more staggering when you consider the band’s fervent devotion to the open road, logging over 800 shows—performing everywhere from freight elevators to a mesmerizing set at Bonnaroo—since their inception. In The Mountain In The Cloud marks the first recording by the band to accurately harness their onstage energy; it’s a recording that places Portugal. The Man’s devout work ethic and singular vision on full display.

While the lineup of John Gourley, Zachary Scott Carothers, Jason Sechrist, and Ryan Neighbors are firmly dedicated to the rock and roll scripture—record, tour, repeat as necessary—Portugal. The Man still remain unsettled on the outskirts of any set genres. With untethered roots, the band offers an audible adaptability, one unlike anything offered by their peers, that allows their music to form over a gradual incubation process. Songs are birthed and then organically evolve over the course of the band’s seemingly endless slate of tour dates, along with the sliver of downtime they allow themselves.

“That’s one thing that we do on tour, we jam and it gives us a good feel for what we can do,” says Gourley, who often pens Portugal. The Man’s songs in a isolated setting; his parent’s home in Willow, Alaska. “Even if I’m writing a song by myself, it’s constantly written around what the band does and around the things that they like.” He continues, “I’ve been really into trying to structure songs properly, it was something that I was really scared of doing in the beginning. I think it’s just playing in a band, you come across chord progressions that you know you’ve heard a million times, so you end up getting into this really bad habit of making these really weird, obscure structures and being a little bit too obscure with melody.”

That isn’t an issue with the dynamic “Got It All (This Can't Be Living Now)” or the sprawling vision of “Sleep Forever,” the ambitious closing number to In The Mountain In The Cloud. The texturally rich “Sleep Forever” softly builds around the tender refrain of Gourley as he makes a morbid confession (“As I finally meet my end I won't be scared, I won't defend the things I've done”) before building to a fevered pitch and unfurling in a swirling mass of backing vocals. The spacious “You Carried Us (All You See)” and bouncy “Senseless” seamlessly expand on the foundation laid by the band’s previous work, yet the coruscate radiation of the slinking “Head Is a Flame (Cool With It),” or the muted political overtones of opener “So American” (where Gourley explains, “There’s a madness in us all”), offer a glimpse of a band naturally progressing in real time.

“We trust each other,” explains Gourley. “They trust me when it comes to the editing of the song, and I trust them when it comes to just writing their parts. Nobody’s trained in music, we just go and play the things that we play and basically just do what we do.”

Arduously recorded over a nomadic stretch of 2010, In The Mountain In The Cloud was captured on tape in El Paso, New York, San Diego, Los Angeles, and finally Seattle. At the helm was producer John Hill (Santigold), along with co-production assistance courtesy of Gourley and the band’s longtime collaborator Casey Bates. “It was a really intense recording process,” says Gourley. Hill’s experience and anomalous point of view meshed with the band’s vision for the album. “I really love that Santigold record,” explains Gourley. “John really helped in the band be the band… he pushed us to do what we wanted.” Following that, the album was placed in the loving hands of Andy Wallace (Nirvana, Jeff Buckley) for mixing.

Portugal. The Man’s insatiable need to create extends far from the recorded product itself, as the band has a detailed hand in their painstakingly assembled artwork—courtesy of The Fantastic The, a collective teaming of Gourley and longtime art director Austin Sellers—unique stage backdrops, merchandise, and just about all other façades of an image that they lovingly control. But much like art, control can be relative, and in the past the band has happily offered the raw artwork files from The Satanic Satanist to fans; asking them to reinterpret and recreate the album’s sprawling artistic vision, and thus continuing a long open dialogue between Portugal. The Man and their followers.

And of course there is the issue we can’t ignore here, that of a band with a unique and hardwired DIY pedigree signing to Atlantic Records. While our punk rock muscle memory might be trained to react vehemently against bands that are seduced into putting ink to page on a major label contract, keep in mind that the Portugal. The Man and Atlantic Records relationship was the result of a long, mutually respectful courtship. While their new label has a well-documented history of famed recordings left in its wake, it was Atlantic’s artist development that brought the band into the fold. As Gourley explained in a gushing open letter to the band’s fiercely loyal flock, “We are people. We are people that happen to love music, we happen to live, eat, sleep, think and love within this bubble of music.” He continues, “Don’t expect to hear from our mouths things like paying our dues, or working towards this moment. No mention of eating poorly or sleeping on hardwood floors. That is what we do for music. We did not go through all that because we thought one day we would hit our payday, we did it because we love what we do. This will not change… It is who we are.”

This album contains no booklet.